FAA: Temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft

The catastrophic failure of an interior sidewall (a deactivated emergency exit) near the rear left of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 on 5 January 2024 on a flight from Portland (PDX) to Ontario (ONT) has resulted in a directive from the USA Federal Aviation Administration requiring an inspection of all similar aircraft before they return to service.

The aircraft in question is a two-month-old Boeing 737 MAX 9. Registration code N704AL, which was carrying 171 passengers and six crew. The aircraft returned to Portland, and landed safely with no fatalities but some minor injuries. The incident has been widely reported, so I am not going to provide further detail here.

It’s no surprise that the FAA has taken the action outlined in its press release below:

The FAA ordered the temporary grounding of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory.
 
“The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said. “Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the NTSB’s investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.”
 
The Emergency Airworthiness Directive (EAD) requires operators to inspect affected aircraft before further flight. The required inspections will take around four to eight hours per aircraft.
 
The EAD will affect approximately 171 airplanes worldwide.

Boeing 737 MAX aircraft plagued by problems

Boeing appears to have dropped the ball on engineering and safety over the last half-decade. The original model suffered two tragic accidents resulting in the death of 346 passengers and crew. The two flights were Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The model was grounded in 2019 for 20 months. Boeing was charged with fraud over the cover-up of faults in the malfunctioning flight control system. Boeing settled with a payment of US$2.5 billion in penalties and compensation.

2PAXfly Takeout

This is the second major aircraft incident in the first week of 2024. The other was the crash between a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 and a Dash 8 at Haneda Airport, Japan. Passengers on the A350 were safely evacuated. Tragically, five on the Dash 8 were killed, with only the pilot surviving with severe injuries.

The Haneda incident appears to be some miscommunication between the pilot of the Dash 8 and air traffic control, so it has nothing really to do with the aircraft manufacturer.

This current incident with a Boeing 737 MAX blocked exit blowing out suggests some kind of engineering fault by the plane’s manufacturer, given the jet was only two months old. The incident adds weight to the accusations by some ex-Boeing employees in the Netflix documentary ‘Downfall: The case against Boeing‘ that engineering and safety standards have suffered at the aircraft manufacturer over the last decade.